Game Selection - How it Works

This is essentially how seat selection has worked since about 2002 or 2003, but always behind the scenes when you submitted me your lists.  With live game selection, it will work the same way - the idea is to give people who have bought the most tickets a better chance at being picked, but to cycle through everyone so that everybody can get at least 2-3 of their top priority picks for the summer.

The Basics:
You get one "name in the hat" for every ticket you've purchased for the season (although it's done using the random number generator in Excel).

In a simplified example, say we have 60 tickets.

• Jon has purchased 20
• Andy has 30
• Mike has 5
• Kate has 5

Jon has 20 of the possible 60 chances for being picked - a 33% chance
Andy has a 50% chance of his name being selected
Mike and Kate each have an 8% chance.

For our group this season, we have about 846 tickets in play (we're not counting the Legends Club seat owners).  If you've purchased 20 tickets, you have a 2.4% chance to be selected at any time...The top purchaser is 60 tickets, who will have a 7.1% chance.

Cycling through picks:

• We pick a random name and that person gets to choose his/her desired game, seat location, and number of tickets.
• We pick another random name, but if we pick the same person again, we ignore him/her until everyone in the group has their first game.

In the example above, let's say we pick Mike first and he chooses his game.  But Mike doesn't get another chance to pick a game (even if we pull his name again) until Jon, Andy, and Kate get their first selection.

So that the people who have the most games are not left with the dregs of the schedule we:

• Do 3 rounds where everyone gets one game before we move on.
• 2 rounds where everyone gets a maximum of two games before we move on.
• From there on, it's strictly random.
• (I may adjust this slightly before 3/27, but I played around with this for awhile with the big group and I think it will work OK.)

Though there are many more people this season (around 40 or so in the selection process), the reality is that you're not all competing for the same sections of seats, so I'm guessing it's going to work pretty close to past years.  People with low-percentage chances are often picked early in rounds.  Very few people are left with tickets that they just can't use.  And most likely, the people who will have the toughest time filling out their selections are those who run out of listed choices (and are not present) or are looking specifically for one section only and/or all 4-ticket games.

Some minor details on the mechanics of this can be explained next Saturday.